I Mentioned In A Post A Few Days Ago,

if there is one place I would like to be time travel transported back to, it would be the Great Exhibition, 

shown above the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, south London, 1854, after its move from Hyde Park in 1851, credit: photograph by Philip Henry Delamotte, 1854 – public domain via Wikimedia Commons, the post I made is here, but here is the thing, look at the size of it, the Crystal Palace had 30,000 nuts and bolts, and was more than 560m long with a roof supported by 3,300 cast iron columns at the time of its construction in 1851, and many people have wondered how such a giant building could be erected in just 190 days, remember this was prior to standardization, nuts and bolts were fabricated by skilled craftspeople, as a result, no two nuts and bolts were alike, this made it almost impossible to replace a bolt or nut once it was lost or broken, or to use nuts and bolts interchangeably, but the palace had a engineering saviour,

in 1841, Joseph Whitworth invented Whitworth screw threads to standardise the pitch of the screw thread – the helical ridge on the outside of a screw or bolt. This was later known as British Standard Whitworth (BSW), the world’s first national screw thread standard, and how do we know? Researchers found both a column bolt from the Crystal Palace and a nut and bolt from the water tower had been made to British Standard Whitworth measurements. The finding confirms that the Whitworth thread was being used in a Crystal Palace building 5 decades before being adopted as a British standard in 1905, “I manufactured new bolts to British Standard Whitworth and demonstrated that they fitted the original nuts,” says lead author Professor John Gardner of Anglia Ruskin University in the UK. Gardner is a Professor of English Literature with an interest in engineering history, how amazing is that? the whole building built in just 190 days!